Law Commons^™

Pandemic Governance, Yanbai Andrea Wang, Justin Weinstein-Tull

All Faculty Scholarship

The COVID-19 pandemic created an unprecedented need for governance by a multiplicity of authorities. The nature of the pandemic—globally communicable, uncontrolled, and initially mysterious—required a coordinated response to a common problem. But the pandemic was superimposed atop our decentralized domestic and international governance structures, and the result was devastating: the United States has a death rate that is eighteenth highest in the world, and the pandemic has had dramatically unequal impacts across the country. COVID-19’s effects have been particularly destructive for communities of color, women, and intersectional populations.

This Article finds order in the chaos of the pandemic response by …

Education Policy Reform In Ghana And The Role Of Avatime Traditional Leaders, Hubert Kwami Akrong

Walden Dissertations and Doctoral Studies

AbstractWith declining academic standards in Ghana, public attention has been focused on education policies. In 1992, the amended constitution excluded traditional village leaders from being involved in formulating education policies in Ghana. The exclusion of grassroots leaders from education policy reform resulted in low expectations and poor student outcomes in the towns and villages of Ghana’s Avatime Traditional Area. This case study was an investigation into how traditional chiefs in the Avatime Traditional Area participate in democratic governance to improve education in the region. Joshee and Goldberg’s social justice theory in policy making was used to ground the study. Data …

The Kind Of Solution A Smart City Is: Knowledge Commons And Postindustrial Pittsburgh, Michael J. Madison

Book Chapters

This case study brings new attention to a critical but under-appreciated dimension of so-called “smart” cities: how smart city governance builds and relies on institutionalized sharing of data, information, and other forms of knowledge across all sectors of public administration. Those smart city practices are referred to here as knowledge commons and systematized using the Governing Knowledge Commons (GKC) research framework. That framework extends and modifies Ostrom’s research tradition as to community-based resource governance. As with other GKC-focused research, this work relies on a qualitative case study. It draws a detailed, context-specific portrait of a smart city as knowledge commons …